on the oregon trail

So here I am in Portland. After all of my rear-brain unsteadiness, I've quit my job working nights at the hotel (at the behest of my ailing body) and decided to take a sojourn to the Pacific Northwest for a little while. I spent a few days in Seattle wandering around and now am here for the Portland Zine Symposium and to wander around. My loneliness and feeling of isolation in cities bigger and more dense than I am used to is compounded by the gloomy weather. How do the populations of these places not commit suicide in mass? I was in a club last night to see some lame live music, lured in by the triple bill featuring francophone garage rock. The bands were all friends and the audience seemed to be composed exclusively of their friends with whom they shared inside jokes from the stage. I sat alone at my junior high cafeteria cabaret table quietly scorning their hipster clique while withholding my internal curmudgeon from the flirty waitress who was just doing her job. The weather seems better today, though. Sun is actually poking unfiltered through fissures in the clouds. I can see genuine azure sky when I crane my neck. I'm sure everything will be cool. I'm growing increasingly comfortable with the organization of the city. Mostly I guess, I just miss Sam and my new puppy. Unlike previous times I've traveled alone, I'm not alone at home also, so this transition to cloistered isolation is unnerving and depressing. And I've only been gone for five days, crap. *love, R.

my puppy momma is a hot bitch


My girlfriend Sam with our new doggy, Molly!

from the mouths of babes

My adorable girlfriend and her adorable girlfriend are finally putting their catty powers to work. Their new project, honey no dot com, chronicles the fashion faux pas so common to our postmodern millieu. And unlike some sites that merely poke fun at the style impaired, these chicks offer some constructive criticism to help begin the healing process.

cracks in the pavement

In attempt to quell the activity slump Sam & I have fallen into lately, I stumbled across an extremely interesting art installation/scavenger hunt/event while exploring the chron for stuff to do around town. A handful of artists placed several hundred small, environmentally inspired works around the city with maps and clues on a website leading to them. We set out after I finished my night shift on Sunday morning with a packet of maps and photo-clues that I'd printed off of the site and wandered around the city and quickly found two really cool embroidered portraits by heather johnson hidden along the interstate and near the old airport. We were so excited that our first two tries out of the gate were successes that we weren't deterred from the adventure after several hours of wondering around various verdant parks, trying to find pieces for which the only clues were a completely ordinary looking trees. Perhaps neither one of us have the artist's (or forest ranger's) eye for distinguishing individual trees from one another, but needless to say, we didn't have much luck. An amusing swing through east austin earned us a bitchin' piece by Jake Borndal following a pleasant run-in with the cats over at fish-r-us. Bolstered by that achievement, we continued on and only decided to give up the hunt after spending two hours trapsing around mopac overpasses with no luck.
All in all it was a great time. Its a brilliant way to get people up and out and to really explore parts of their city that they would probably otherwise never come in contact with. I didn't even mind the missed clues, the neck strain, and time spent inspecting every freakin' tree in the park with exacting care only to come up with nullity because even when we didn't find anything, we found something. *love, r.








update:Heather Johnson, the artist behind the two embroidered pieces we found, in turn found the calling cards we left behind and linked to this site from her own. Also, KUT 90.5fm ran a piece on the project this morning: listen.

all hail seitan, our new dark lord

When I first started getting into cooking when I was around 14, I decided that I also wanted to write a cookbook. Not like some sell-out Emeril bullshit, but like a hand-made book with recipes that I could force my children to accept as an heirloom in lieu of money or property. I'd really wanted to have my dad do some illustrations in it, make it a family project. I got a blank book and hand transcribed a couple of my time-tested recipes. I made countless dishes, but now the bar was set so high, very few made it into the pristine pages of my slowly progressing cookbook. I started college and moved into a dorm where the extent of the cooking I could possibly do was craftily warming soups on my coffee maker hotplate. The book itself was misplaced somewhere in one of the moves. I'd moved into several apartments but between work and school, I seldom got to cook. When I moved into a place by myself, cooking for only myself, it was much less enjoyable. When Sam started weightwatchers, it gave me the perfect opportunity to flex my chef-muscles again, even better that her new diet syncs perfectly with my vegetarian one. Looking for recipes, making grocery lists, shopping for ingredients, and sharing meals together has been really fun for me. We've even resurected the cookbook idea and as a place to test recipes, I've made the herbivore recipe blog to cull recipes from weightwatchers, epicurious, vegweb, and vegetarian times as well as the cookbooks we have around the house. *love, r.